This section is intended to introduce the reader to various aspects of art, which may be related to various aspects of the present invention that are described and/or claimed below. This discussion is believed to be helpful in providing the reader with background information to facilitate a better understanding of the various aspects of the present invention. Accordingly, it should be understood that these statements are to be read in this light, and not as admissions of prior art.
In electronic commerce and data marketing, parties frequently exchange information and technology that is proprietary yet susceptible to misappropriation. For example, one party may have proprietary data which is useful with a proprietary program owned by a second party. It may be desirable to analyze the proprietary data with the proprietary program to provide useful and valuable results. However, risks are involved with such an exchange. Often times, parties desiring to exchange information and/or technology are mutually untrusting parties. In other words, a party that owns proprietary data may be suspicious that a party with a proprietary program might be inclined to sell or otherwise disclose the proprietary data in an inappropriate manner. Similarly, a party that has developed a proprietary program may not trust the party that owns the proprietary data with the program, fearing that the party that owns the proprietary data might reverse engineer the proprietary program and decipher a valuable algorithm or the like.
Accordingly, the data owner may not wish to reveal the data to the program owner and the program owner may not wish to reveal the program to the data owner. One potential solution may be to employ a third party intermediary (i.e. a party who owns neither the proprietary data nor the proprietary program) to perform the analysis on the proprietary data using the proprietary program and provide the results to the requesting party. The use of a third party intermediary, however, is only appropriate in a situation in which both the owner of the proprietary data and the owner of the proprietary program trust that the intermediary will not inappropriately disclose or try to profit from its access to either the proprietary data or the proprietary program.
In view of the potential misappropriation discussed above, it is desirable to have a technique for sharing information and/or technology that reduces the risk of revealing proprietary information and/or technology inappropriately to other participating parties or subjecting the information and/or technology to easy misappropriation by others not involved in the transaction at all and to provide other advantages.